Great to hear things are working for now. In general, getting help from the forum as you're doing is ideal because then anyone can jump in to help and the answers are visible to all. However, if you are under time pressure and you'd like more active help such as someone setting up servers with/for you, doing form design for you, etc, please fill out the form in Need data collection help for COVID-19 response?.
Thank you for reporting this. @aurdipas just discovered and reported this bug a couple of weeks ago and there is a fix for it that should go out in the next couple of weeks. I'm glad you are able to work around it for now. It affects any character that needs to be URL-encoded so if you only use letters, numbers, - and _ in your form_id, you will be ok. You can explicitly set a form_id for a form as described in the documentation. Otherwise it is based off the filename of the form definition.